Shift by Stephen Pisani
We drove in reverse the whole way. Backwards through The Town Overlooking the River. The wrong way past The Village with No Villagers. We entered The City on a Hill That’s More Like a Mountain through the exit.
We drove in reverse the whole way. Except when we didn’t. We moved sideways on The Road Without Lanes. Horizontally crossed The Lake That’s Been Dried Up for Years. We moved from the west end of The Plains Reduced to Mud to the east.
We drove in reverse part of the way. It depended on who had the wheel. A few of us didn’t like the dirty looks we got when the car rolled up, rear bumper first. We couldn’t take the snickers, the whispers, the grins, the hands held over the mouths to disguise the laughter. “We’ll just go forward,” we said. “We’ll drive in the correct direction.”
We drove forward, sideways, and backwards for days. Everyone took their turn. Most of the time the rest of us slept, or played cards, or sang songs absent a rhythm, or told stories that never came to a proper conclusion. We only looked behind, beside, or in front of us to see where we were going. The Destination with Still More Road to Travel never seemed to get any closer. Sometimes we wondered whether we weren’t going the wrong way this whole time.
Stephen Pisani is an MFA candidate in fiction at Adelphi University. His work has appeared in Truffle Magazine, the Under Review, Light Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. He spends his spare time working at a golf course, where he watches people chase a little ball around a big patch of grass.